BIG CLAIMS: Tom Biscardi holds up a photo of an animal he claims is Bigfoot, at a press conference August 15, 2008, in Palo Alto, California
Image: Erik Vance/copyright Scientific American
-
Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?
Why do testicles hang the way they do? Is there an adaptive function to the female orgasm? What does it feel like to want to kill yourself? Does “free will”...
Read More »
PALO ALTO, CALIF.—It was perhaps the most highly touted press conference of the week, but it didn't reveal much in the way of evidence: Three bigfoot enthusiasts announced today that a series of genetic tests performed on samples taken from a carcass they claim is a Sasquatch came back as a mixture of human and opossum.
In addition to the mixed DNA results, Tom Biscardi, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer showed the audience two blurry photos, one of a solitary figure in mixed hardwood forest and another of the mouth of what appeared to be the tongue and teeth of a primate.
Nevertheless, fielding questions from a packed room in Palo Alto, the trio called their discovery groundbreaking and held to their claim that the animal they are currently holding in "an undisclosed location" is indeed the legendary bigfoot.
"We're not bigfoot hunters originally," Whitton said. "We stumbled upon this creature. It was a stroke of luck, I can tell you that."
Whitton and Dyer said they discovered the carcass when they were hiking in a forest near their home sometime in June and that it has been stored in a large freezer since then. They refused to say exactly where and when, stating only that it was in northern Georgia and that they captured video of several live animals.
They said when they found the carcass they hauled it into a truck and brought it to a freezer. They then set up a Web site to offer tours into the area and made an announcement on a bigfoot enthusiast radio program.
That's when Biscardi got involved, moved the animal to another location, and began contacting the media. In the week before the press conference, Whitton and Dyer spent several days sparring with skeptics and created a YouTube video where they held a stuffed bear up to the camera and repeated their claims of having found a Sasquatch.
Meanwhile, Biscardi sent three samples of the carcass to biologist Curtis Nelson at the University of Minnesota for analysis. In an e-mail, Nelson told Biscardi that most of DNA segments taken from two of the samples matched human DNA. One came back as a likely match for an American opossum. Biscardi said this is likely from a stomach sample and that the creature might have eaten an opossum. He did not say why he had sampled from the stomach.
See what we're tweeting about
28 Comments
Add Commentit's a given that we have yet to discover every species on the planet. It is entirely possible that Big Foot exists and avoids mankind, After all it would have to be able to avoid threats and humans have such a positive history with new species. So far we have cut up or eaten everything we ever found. A violent and selfish species are we.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"...soon he would bring in ... journalists from Fox News to inspect the body..."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell that clinches it then. Fox news should certainly lend this discovery the credibility it deserves!
WHAT ABOUT THE FREEZER CAN IT FIT "the costume"?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFREEZER SIZE
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisgood job driving your point home!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI suppose to bale out of this crap, we'll hear that the other "bigfoots" came and stole the remains so there won't be any to produce. Really lame.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe next breaking news on this subject will report the body was removed by the other "bigfoots" and is no longer available. All B.S.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBigfootology is precisely a religion, because in Faithland, anything that's impossible is easily possible, and any excuse is good enough to counter any valid objection. Did humans trap or shoot every last wolf and grizzly in California since the 49ers started crawling throughout the Sierras, but NOBODY got one single bigfoot? No problem, there's an answer for everything. BTW I have a mobile made from bear jaws found in deep wilderness areas. Someone should explain that away, because in bigfootology "No one has ever found a bone from a naturally deceased bear, either."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOK I JUST WANT TO SAY CONGRATS-THIS IS A GREAT FIND. DONT LISTEN TO ALL THE CRAP OK -THEY JUST WISH THEY FOUND IT FIRST. GOOD LUCK AND I CANT WAIT TO HEAR MORE ABOUT YOUR GREAT FIND.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOK I JUST WANT TO SAY CONGRATS-AND DONT LISTEN TO ALL THE CRAP -THEY JUST WISH THEY FOUND THIS FIRST. I CANT WAIT TO HEAR AND SEE MORE ABOUT YOUR GREAT FIND.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNext breaking news: other bigfoots raid the undisclosed location of the freezer (does that thing even work and is it plugged in?) to steal the body and all other "evidence" before National Inquirer can send in a "reporter" wearing a camera-concealing trucker cap. Or some variation of this, 'cause these redneck hicks seem to be "smarter than the average bear" when it comes to making up credible stories.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBig foot is a ghost...Like ghosts,they can be seen ,ghosts can move furniture , so why couldn't a huge ghost creature leave foot imprints?This is why you will never find any evidence..
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisbig foot is a ghost,that is why you can see him/it .Ghosts can move furniture ,so why wouldn't a huge ghost creature leave a foot impression?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm a firm believer in the existence of Bigfoot. Guys like these ought to be locked up. Where is Peter, Rene, John and Grover when we need them. Oh yeah, mostly dead. I'm going to email Autumn Williams so she can make everything all better. I like her, she's cute.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEveryone is missing the obvious. If tissue from this corpse tested as human DNA, then these guys have got a human body (no matter how big or hairy) stashed in their fridge. This is a matter for the police and coroner, not a triumvirate of greedy BigFoot hunters. For all we know, they killed this "creature" which is Murder 1 where I come from. If you guys want to see the body, get law enforcement to arrest them and take possession of it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy is Sciam even giving time to this rubbish? When I was young, Scientific American was a highly regarded difficult to read publication that made one want to aspire to greater things. Today it seems like the sort of dumbed down publication one would find here in the dumbed down UK. What hope humanity if scientists of the future are educated and informed by such low quality publishing. I fear we are headed towards a technological dark age because a generation or more of people will lack the intelligence to cope. Sciam, go back to your roots and save us all - and start by pulling this story.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBigfoot or not? Who cares? I don't.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have transported a 500 pound animal in the bush, let me tell you something. You can't do it with two people. We were going down hill and need six people to move our darted male Waterbuck 1/4 to the truck. That right there disproves at least the 500 pound part.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTwo guys can't move a 500 pound "carcass", I moved a male Waterbuck 1/4 down hill to the truck. It took 8 of us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSiigghh...Yes, you made your nasty little point. How clever you are, ridiculing the bigfoot believers. The majority of whom are well aware of this Biscardi buffoon. How smart and educated you must feel.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust remember, the mountain gorilla was thought to be a myth until 1912, the coelecanth, thought extinct for a millenia was caught alive in 1938, and video of a giant squid obtained just in the last few years.
If you're going to be a skeptic, be a true one -who actually examines evidence- instead of being a "scofftic" who is afraid or doesn't bother to and bleating "there is no evidence". There are vast wads of unknown primate hair, miles of footprints and piles of giant dung, -yes, go ahead, get your grade school snickering over with- that cannot be attributed to humans or any other woodland creature. Not enough food to support a creature that size? Then what do bears eat?
Science investigates. Science does not say "We've discovered everything already and there's no way that can exist".
I often wonder why people are so afraid to examine the notion of this creature. I've heard 2 separate but similar comments twice in the past few weeks that may shed some light. It had to do with land mass in the U.S. Two know-it-alls proclaimed that you couldn't go anywhere in North America without being a mile from a road, which is the most unbelievably naive and pitifully uneducated sentiment I ever heard in my life. Maybe THEY have never been a mile from a road, but they would be utterly astounded I think to learn of the vast hundred and thousand square mile tracts of land in the U.S. that haven't seen a human since they were first surveyed 200 years ago. More than enough space to harbor a shrinking, yet stable population of primates. Maybe the concept of another bipedal primate just strikes too deeply at the human psyche and our sense of being at the top of the food chain. Better to deny it all than entertain the chance something is in the woods that is almost as smart as we are.
Is there a chance sasquatches don't exist? Sure, but I think the possibility they do is far, far more likely than not.
It is a shame that people would seek to scam the public with these absurd hoaxes. This sort of deceit detracts credibility from those who have had true encounters with that not yet proven by credible proof. I had an encounter with what I believe was a Sasquatch while doing trailwork in the Sauk River wilderness of Washington. A friend and I were sitting by a campfire and I felt something was watching us from the forest nearby. I scanned the trees with my headlamp, focusing on an area I felt was where our watcher was stationed. My friend commented that I was wasting my battery, so I set the light down. A couple of seconds later, something broke a very large branch--and I knew the sounds of various sizes of wood breaking from the many fallen trees we had removed from the trail, from small limbs to trees five feet in diameter. I hurried into the camper on my pickup, and convinced my friend to do the same. After a few minutes, music playing half-volume on my CD player, curtains closed, we heard what sounded at first like a distant explosion. I turned off the music, and said, "What the *&$% was that?!?" We were far from town and any conceivable human source of said noise. A moment later, a thud that shook the truck (a very heavy 1963 Dodge Powerwagon) scared the &^%$ out of both of us (think the glass of water in Jurassic Park). The source of this ground shaking thud was on the other side of the thin wall of my side of the camper. Four or five more heavy "footsteps" proceeded towards the back of the truck. We were both too petrified to even move the curtains to look out the window. Next day, we took turns jumping from the side of the pickup bed, the other inside to gauge the effect. No comparison to the heavy ground shaking thud could be forced by our attempts to immitate this heavy creature's stomping steps.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe next day returning from lunch to trim brush, I spied a form through a clear alley vista between undergrowth. About sixty or seventy yards away was the shape of a human form, dark brown, standing and staring at us. I couldn't make out the details of face and so forth, but after attempting to change places with another of the crew who said he was seeing the same thing, and thus temporarily loosing sight of the phantom figure, it slipped away. Returning to my original vista, what I had seen was gone. We walked to where the figure had been, and noted that compared to nearby objects (a trail sign and various standing dead trees and stumps) what I had seen must have been over eight feet tall . . .
(continued)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe hiked a ways up the trail next to which this phantom had stood, and though we did not see anything, we began to hear a howl or call that I have never heard in the wilderness before or since. I responded with an imitation of the sound I had heard, and the call repeated several times until fading into the distance.
I still question what we experienced, though the evidence is fairly strong by my interpretation. I want to believe that there are many undiscovered and mysterious creatures existing, and have some certainty regarding numerous other "cryptozoological encounters" and "supernatural occurences" I have experienced in my wanderings around this amazing world, but I am always cautious to express doubts about even my most certain experiences of unusual nature. For people to create these elaborate hoaxes is unethical and counterproductive to the endeavor to discover and explore the wonderful mysteries of this world. Shame on those who would deceive to make a buck.
I'm really sorry to be a killjoy...not that I don't believe that Bigfoot might exist...I just don't believe there is any possible way something so large could survive for so long in such a populated area. We would find some sort of evidence of existence, like feces, on a regular basis. If Bigfoot just lies down by a creek and dies, why haven't we found skeletal remains? We find remains of animals that have been dead for long periods of time everyday. Basically, I'm saying that if they found this body somewhere like Alaska, I might believe it's possible, but somehow it's really hard to believe that a 500 lb, 7 ft 7 in. animal could have eluded us throughout its entire existence while simply living in Georgia. But, I guess anything's possible. We'll just have to see. Oh, by the way, did y'all notice those pearly whites? I guess Bigfoot owned a toothbrush.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this" A violent and selfish species are we."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlease direct me to the other zoos, museums, reserves that other predators have created for their prey.
I'm also waiting for that footage on Nat Geo where the tiger stops hunting because it feels sorry that its dinner will leave the baby deer motherless.
Show me one animal species that is less violent and selfish than humans. Given the opportunity, the animals that won't kill you, will certainly be more than happy to eat you and your family.
Herbivores? Nope. They will eat as much as they can and destroy the landscape. But you're welcome to let a pack of Koalas run around your house.
You are free to hate yourself and refer to yourself as violent and selfish. Leave the rest of us out of it.
Big foot, 1000 years with no proof, he is the ultimate ninja
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet me get this straight: These two guys have a corpse in their freezer. They hired a professor to DNA test it. The results came back as human. So why haven't the police stepped in? They have basically admitted to finding human remains in the woods and taking them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf the dna that was tested came back Human then theese guys are guilty of disturbing a crime scene and took the corpse... time for the police to come in and take the body so the family can be notified. And they need to be arrested. They claim they have a body with human dna, the police should have been there immediatly and taken the body. So I guess this is a hoax
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf they are coming forward, claiming to have a deceased body with human DNA, why haven't the police arrested them for hiding what likely is a murder victim.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this